Why art matters in the world, and its relevance to you

What sets Subvert apart is my adherence to studying emerging artists.

Why do I pay so much attention to these artists, when there are masters to be studied? Why should you care about emerging artists? There are art historians and art museums bursting at the seams to tell you about Monet or Picasso, so why care about this?

Cultural relevancy.

Art should be a tool for critical engagement.

So much of how art has historically been presented to us has been wholly detached from the actual lives we all lead.

Art should be used to understand our world as it currently is. It should help us decide how we’d like to respond and interact with our circumstances and communities. Contextualizing art in this way is a practice of critically engaging. This type of arts appreciation rests on cultural relevancy, and is central to my work.

Old art retains its potency as far as human emotions go. Art is an emotional currency, and human emotions stay the same, pretty much, throughout history. I’m pretty sure. Yet…

I want art to go much further than our emotional experience.

A brilliant friend of mine recently said to me that art can be both a mirror and a portal. It can mirror what we’ve felt and experienced. It can also be a portal to push us beyond what we know, to deepen our awareness.

I want art to help us critically engage with everything that is going on in the world. Art that is critically engaged with, helps us to become active participants in the shaping of the world. Integrate art in your life to participate in the setting and envisioning of our future.

I want art to teach us how to deal with this precise moment. I want art to teach us how to respond to our present circumstances, to what we will read in the news today. Art should be flushed with cultural relevancy, and used as a way for us to process and digest. So often, our response to the news is to get overwhelmed and numbed.

I want art to teach us this with all the specificity and awareness of the present moment. Like an attentive parent, or a zen teacher, or a professor you work closely with. Art should be a mentor, who cares deeply and is intimate with the fine details, cultural context, and criticality of the moment. Not some ancient and disconnected notion.

Only then can it be used as a tool, as a personal and collective medicine.

Let’s break it open a bit. What is critical engagement? And what is an emerging artist?

Critical engagement

Critically engaging with art means to contextualize it within our raced, gendered and classed society. We are applying a critical lens when we explore how a piece exemplifies oppression. We apply a critical lens when we envision a new world. Critical engagement allows us to deconstruct our subtle and overt participation in the violence against others, our planet, and our selves.

For arts literacy to be used as a medicine, we need artists who are producing right now. Ideally, these artists are still experimenting with subject, style, medium or tone. It should go without saying, that they need to have a vast array of backgrounds, viewpoints, ideas, visions, and panache. Which leads us to…

Emerging artists

Emerging has nothing to do whatsoever with age nor talent. An emerging artist does not necessarily mean a young artist. It means an artist who is coming into her artistry. Though often this artist has the fervor of young love, the flushed cheeks and avid curiosity for expression, that makes her work so striking.

Which leads me to what good art is.

Good art is art that strikes you. Art that moves you. Art that leaves an impression. This can be, and is often, emotional. But it is my belief that when art is tied to the moment, it is able to moves us toward action. Art that is culturally relevant moves us toward becoming better, more involved, more connected people. Art becomes potent when it is able to speak to the cultural, political, and ecological moment. It should speak to our particular ache, or anxiety, or yearning. All of which are absolutely societally informed.

This is why we need to culturally center art, and individually seek out emerging artists. We must. We must find artists who strike us, who hit on that note we’d been missing. We are all trying to understand ourselves and one another. And good art can sometimes who hit that note so perfectly, so resoundingly, we are suddenly moved into clarity. If only for a second. (Want a step-by-step guide? Enroll in the course I teach.)

Contemporary art is a mentor. The bodies of work currently being produced are holy bodies we can come to in our seeking. These are bodies we can become lovers of, and so glean an understanding of our possible responses to the present moment. Art shows us what is possible. These are bodies of work that can give us a sense of centeredness, a clarity of purpose, however fleeting, nonetheless bright.

Through these bodies, these pieces, these lovers we learn from, we can move toward the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.